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We caught up with Thomas Heatherwick, eponymous founder of the London-based studio, at the opening of his retrospective exhibition, Provocations, now on view at New York's Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum through Jan. 3.

More than a half-century ago, Houston's flood-prone Buffalo Bayou was unceremoniously turned into a straight sluice to carry excess water to the Gulf of Mexico. In 2012, the city embarked on a $58 million plan to restore the river’s natural bends and build new wetlands and parks, transforming this onetime eyesore into an urban amenity. Much of the credit for its success goes to Kevin Shanley, a landscape architect and principal at SWA Group, based in the firm’s Houston office. We asked Shanley, who specializes in urban river projects, about the rebirth of the Buffalo Bayou and the benefits of restoring natural habitats to urban waterways.

Jim Kelly first began pondering the possibilities and limitations of renewables as a senior vice president of transmission and distribution for Southern California Edison. After 38 years with the state’s second-largest utility, he was named CEO of Advanced Rail Energy Storage, or ARES, which developed a system that draws energy from the grid to run weighted rail cars up an incline. When demand spikes, the cars roll downhill and a regenerative braking system generates electricity that is dispatched back to the grid. On the basis of its quarter-scale test facility in California’s Tehachapi Mountains, ARES received its first commercial commission, in 2014, to deliver reliable, renewable energy to Southern California from Nevada by 2017.

Tomato fiber, retired currency, and used cigarette filters are just a few of the things researchers are thinking about when they're developing greener materials. Delve into the material science behind automotive design.